The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers—as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.
If you are a creative person on social media – especially if you are one of my fellow musicians hoping to “crack” the algo – I really think you should read this blog post by Cory Doctorow on the Enshittification of platforms.
I know so many artists who live in agonising hope of social media success. There are no gatekeepers any more! Anyone can succeed! You just have to crack the codes of the algorithm. Find its rhythms. Please it, and all will be yours.
There’s no code. There’s nothing to solve. This is just another gatekeeper.
It doesn’t deserve the emotional tax you pay it.
Advertisers are the customers. Attention is the product. You know this already. But we have to stop indulging this cruel game that we can succeed – make it! – on social media if we can just figure out the algorithm. There’s no patterns. No strategy. Some people have to win, or the whole thing falls flat.
There’s a woman in my local community who wears a hat on TikTok. That’s the concept. She has more followers than I’ll ever have. I’m not having a go. Good for her. It clearly brings joy. But this can’t be mistaken for a strategy. She isn’t better at this than you or I. She was allowed to win the big bear, so we can see her walking round the fair with the big bear.
That’s why we think we can win a bear too.
Someone needs to win the bear.
Focuses on TikTok, but the rules apply across the board. The claw machine has worked for some people. It has to. It has promised you fame and fortune. It has to pay out sometimes.
TikTok has tried to give me a giant teddy bear. I was very excited to get it. 25k views on one pretty random video. If I keep playing, I’ll get to keep the bear.
We deserve better than this.
I used Jeepy-T to create the featured image on a blogpost about the enshittification of the internet. Oh, funnysad irony.
xKH
Leave a Reply